Hot grapes: How to locally redesign geographical indications to address the impact of climate change

Geographical indications (GIs) represent the main legal framework for protecting the tie between site-specific food
products and their places of production. Climate change recently emerged as a major challenge to the framework,
uncovering its inaptitude to account for shifting product identities. Scholarly studies have so far debated the main
ecological, cultural, and economic issues that climate change poses to GIs. But, they overlooked systemic concep-
tual problems affecting their legal framework. This paper uses philosophical tools typical of analytic metaphysics
to provide an original conceptual framework for rethinking GIs. We begin with a recognition of the conceptual
challenges that climate change poses to the legal framework for GIs. Next, we present our framework for GIs,
articulating its internal dimensions while offering some examples. Finally, we appraise the functions that the
framework can play in rethinking GIs: provide a broad and flexible theoretical structure, while also contributing
to design new participatory strategies for deliberating about their identities, which involve a usually silenced
class of stakeholders. Our work contributes to broadening the scopes and methods of philosophy as well as to
complementing disciplines traditionally dealing with climate change, by supplying missing conceptual tools. The
framework we lay out can be used as a proxy for rethinking GIs through new decision-making processes that
carve out a role also for local actors and communities along with the usual stakeholders.